I don’t know about a hard cap. Shelves and caps tend to inspire creative accounting just shy of fraud, and we can achieve the same effect with an accelerated scale that curtails runaway capital accumulation.

What I would be most interested in seeing is the introduction of public equity. Corporations of course benefit hugely from public services/infrastructure but often are directly funded by the US government. Any venture capital group or bank funding these companies would demand equity in return, yet the government doesn’t ask for equity on behalf of the public. The average citizen is offered only a share of the increased public debt.

And it’s not pocket change we’re talking about. Even if one only counts the larger stimulus budgets of recent history, they can match them to historic share prices and just track the growth and dividends of those shares as the returns compound over time. They would find that it’s a sizable stake in these companies that the public is owed (and a controlling stake in the case of full bail-outs, meaning decision-making power).

Taxes are definitely important, but easier to side-step or postpone for large public corporations, who have many options for how they represent their finances. Equity on the other hand is far simpler. It’s cumulative, so as long as the correct percentage of shares are transferred, future taxes are guaranteed paid, and more importantly they can no longer finagle a $0 tax liability while at the same time distributing revenue to shareholders, because the public is a shareholder. And the growth of that equity increases public wealth in step with the market. That way the average citizen always has a baseline stake in the economy, a birthright entitlement, which might better reflect the actual value offered to a company by the public.

Edit: forgot to mention, this is a rather direct pathway to Universal Basic Income (UBI), which is often criticized for being difficult to get off the ground. One of the coolest features of Public Equity is that if instead of reinvesting dividends you send them to shareholders as a distribution, you now have UBI.

Mad Max the musical now on Broadway

It would be easy to find enough solar panels to charge an electric vehicle in most sunny areas, though it would probably be easier to just look for a large enough existing install and skip all the DIY. (Just look for the shiniest roof.)

But I think the real problem is in the EV itself. Batteries self-discharge and chemically degrade over time, so unless the apocalypse was recent, a lot of EVs you find might have damaged batteries, especially if fully discharged to begin with.

You could cannibalize one or more EVs to cobble together enough good cells to get past the safety cutoffs, but it would take a while and you would need to be careful since internal voltage in EVs tends to be high (like 400-800 volts).

TLDR: if this is a movie depiction, definitely use a montage.

This and the following thread are great guidelines for would-be PMs.

Personally, however, I will avoid the role for the rest of my life, because it’s too much work.

She sent you on a Costco run alone. She knew the score.

Lol I noticed the same. They evidently have some ongoing internal disagreement as to their target audience. Docs and functionality says “our audience is enterprise developers” but their marketing definitely says “our audience is end users.”

It may be explained by recent partnerships with former custom ISO devs (seeking legitimacy and offering a sizable user base in turn). I expect the plan is eventually to sell premium support for an enterprise toolset, but for now their target audience is the non-dev-but-tech-savvy end user. And those happen to be surprisingly opinionated re: java and electron.

Forgive me for not explaining better. Here are the terms potentially needing explanation.

• Provisioning in this case is initial system setup, the kind of stuff you would do manually after a fresh install, but usually implies a regimented and repeatable process.
• Virtual Machine (VM) snapshots are like a save state in a game, and are often used to reset a virtual machine to a particular known-working condition.
• Preboot Execution Environment (PXE, aka ‘network boot’) is a network adapter feature that lets you boot a physical machine from a hosted network image rather than the usual installation on locally attached storage. It’s probably tucked away in your BIOS settings, but many computers have the feature since it’s a common requirement in commercial deployments. As with the VM snapshot described above, a PXE image is typically a known-working state that resets on each boot.
• Non-virtualized means not using hardware virtualization, and I meant specifically not running inside a virtual machine.
• Local-only means without a network or just not booting from a network-hosted image.
• Telemetry refers to the data harvesting apparatus. Most software has it. Windows has a lot. Telemetry isn’t necessarily bad but it is easily abused by data-hungry corporations like MS, so disabling it is a precaution.
• MS = Microsoft
• OSS = Open Source Software
• Group policies are administrative settings in Windows that control standards (for stuff like security, power management, licensing, software and file system access, etc.) for user groups on a machine or network. Most users stick with the defaults but you can edit these yourself for a greater degree of control.
• Docker lets you run software inside “containers” to isolate them from the rest of the environment, exposing only what they need to run, and Compose is a related tool for defining one or more of these containers, the resources they need, how they interact, etc. To my knowledge the only equivalent for Windows to date is Wine and its successors like Proton.

Many of these concepts are IT-related, as are the use-cases I had in mind, but the software is simple to use if you pick one of the premade playbooks. (The AtlasOS playbook is popular among gamers, for example.)

Edit: added docker

Just a tip: if you must use consumer editions of Windows regularly, consider adding an automatic provisioning tool like AME to your workflow.

The example above uses customizable “playbooks” to provision a system the way docker compose would a container image, so it can fill the role of a VM snapshot or PXE in non-virtualized local-only scenarios.

The most popular playbooks strip out AI components and services (there are many more than just Recall) but also disable all telemetry and cloud-based features, replace MS bloatware with preferred OSS, curtail a truckload of annoying Windows behaviors, setup more sensible group policies than the defaults, and so forth.

I have a few custom playbooks for recurring use cases so that, when one presents, I can spin up an instance quickly without the usual hassle and risk.

Now that’s a Picard Maneuver.

When I was a child, English had the convention of alternating parentheses with brackets (so a nested thought [like this (or this)] would be slightly easier to place within shifting contexts).

Seems like a good solution, but I’ve found excessive nesting of thoughts has a side effect of making a writer seem distracted, scattered, or otherwise just difficult to follow.

I never figured out how, but it tended to feel impossibly early in the game too, as if the opponent had already been developing their economy for at least as long as I had before the game had even started.

I agree, and once would have dismissed the sociopolitical pragmatism described by the commenter above as “lowering our discourse to their level” or something of the sort.

I eventually realized that this instinctive criticism was valid only if they were still growing as people, and capable of more than what they are now. The assumption is that setting higher expectations might convince them to “elevate their discourse” if only to save face.

But what I’ve come to realize is that this was far too much to expect. By all the evidence available to date, these folks never advanced far beyond the emotional maturity of the average middle schooler. At this level of maturity, superficial and public humiliation is quite literally the most serious attack, as it bloodies waters presumed to be infested with sharks.

Yes it’s pathetic, and yes “stooping to their level” feels gross, but Republican voters are only enthused by policies which benefit them directly or hurt others they feel deserve it. Perceived power matters a lot to them, and seems to be attached to explicit expressions of it that are similarly pathetic— as in, truck nuts, “I am very smart,” “I have a great brain and concepts of a plan,” etc.

So public humiliation of trump for an otherwise petty and irrelevant issue (especially by someone he can’t touch without losing a chunk of his base) absolutely succeeds in making him look weak, and making Trump look weak is directly correlated with his voters’ loss of motivation to vote (see RWA personality type/disorder; it’s fascinating).

Enough of these successful offensives will cause his most die-hard voters to lose faith in him (caveat: to seek out somebody stronger) so to de-motivate a current right-wing conservative voter, likely we must accept that petty “mean girl” tactics are the only language they understand, due to their arrested emotional development, and robbing them of their “strongman” is both easy and effective. Ridicule the emperor with no clothes and his voters, who are themselves unclothed, might go home and rethink their fashion statement.

TLDR: It sucks but crass pragmatism may be warranted in this case. The first language of Trump voters is small-mindedness, and it’s often the only one they understand, so we might consider rolling our sleeves up and speaking it if only so future generations don’t have to.

Edit: corrected swype errors.

“But the blue suit is MY BRAND!”

Lol look I’m all for pointless belligerence and poindextering online, and do it myself often, but (a) I’m gonna go out on a limb and say commenter above probably doesn’t think they’re actually the same, and regardless (b) things don’t have to be precisely the same to make abstract comparisons that aid understanding or help learn something new.

For example, your smartphone comparison. Some have a programmable RF transponder that passively converts a nearby RF pulse into a digital reply. They can read other transponders as well. If you and a friend agreed on a cipher, you could pretend to be secret agents by taking turns programming a brief “text,” switching off the device and leaving it on your desk for the other to scan as they pass by. It’s bidirectional and point to point with passive transmission, but it’s wireless and powered by electromagnetic waves rather than acoustic :D see? It’s fun.

Edit: spelling

That’s fair. It certainly does feel like regression. There are all kinds of social values gen x and y remember being taught that somehow were forgotten by the very people who taught them.

“Somehow” is not terribly difficult to work out once we start pulling threads. This well-oiled machine of right-wing propaganda we have today took decades to evolve. Right-wing narrative framing grew in popularity during the mccarthy era, and expanded continually after Raegan’s repeal of fairness doctrine with the rise of [neo]conservative AM talk radio, the 24-hour news cycle, the spread of Murdoch-style tabloid journalism, digital platforms, the algorithmic feeds, tea party, brexit, etc. The onslaught of reality denial and fear is breathtaking.

The post-truth, “alternative facts” era we’re in now is so chaotic that even the educated who should be well-equipped to tell fact from fiction often find it hard to recognize satire, of all things. Conservative boomers, however, most of whom lived in rural areas and didn’t continue education past high school if they graduated at all, have been heavily indoctrinated. And once they started joining the global forum en masse in the 90s and 00s, their indoctrination was inadvertently converted to radicalism by engagement-oriented media saturation.

This subset of boomers is mostly to blame for the generation’s poor reputation, I suspect. They had already been on a steady diet of right-wing propaganda for decades, even if they weren’t yet fully radicalized. But their salient characteristic was how easy they were to manipulate, since they would tolerate and even dutifully spread any lie that affirmed their existing opinions. They could be motivated by prejudice due to their isolation, fear due to their lack of knowledge, and tribalism due to their economic struggles. Above all they were reliable voters, donators, and consumers, making them the perfect marks for populists, demagogues, oligopolists, and hostile foreign powers.

Sometimes I feel like this group really didn’t stand a chance in the face of protracted psychological manipulation from so many groups. I’ve wanted to see the good in them and somehow bring them back to the light. But increasingly I fear that their radicalization is intractable, and there simply isn’t the time left for the journey back. Regardless, the damage is done, if not yet fully realized, and all we can do is stop the poison and rebuild from whatever is salvageable.

The poison is capital. In spite of the systematic brainwashing of the populous, one of the last moorings to fidelity and truth in US politics were the public servants themselves, many of whom pursued politics as a vocation or calling and believed in the mission of a government for the people, even a few republicans. But we let money into politics by degrees, then all at once with citizens united. With that case, corruption of the government was legalized and representation was officially bound to capital. Until that is struck down, and strict regulation of money in politics is enforced, any and all political progress will be thwarted. Capital will continue poisoning our government until there’s nothing left to save. It has to be removed.

While this is all plausible, may describe your personal experience fully, and may to some extent be true for a subset of the population, it appears that the notion of the baby boomer generation being, or ever having been, more progressive than the generations that followed is unequivocally false, according to any high quality polling data I’ve yet found. If this is something you are reading somewhere, I would be curious to know where so I can discover how they arrive at that conclusion.

I’m certainly not saying there aren’t progressive boomers or conservative younger people. There’s always a spectrum for every group, no matter how you define the cohorts. The baby boomers on the whole just happen to skew more conservative than the younger generations, and it is an especially strong correlation at that.

Which, come to think of it, is essentially the tin can method, just with conversion to an electrical signal that preserves fidelity over longer distances than kinetic vibrations on a string.

I dunno, some of them might suddenly have a great deal of potential